


i'm wide awake / it's morning

by iodo



Category: Code Geass
Genre: M/M, decaying ruins of post-postindustrial society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iodo/pseuds/iodo
Summary: The war is not yet over. Suzaku and Lelouch take a road trip.
Relationships: Kururugi Suzaku/Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	i'm wide awake / it's morning

Britannia’s edges are nothing like its core. The tendrils of empire grow weary here. Land lies old and forgotten, disused in pockets and gaps and finally long, wide stretches. No urbanity, no metal, no smoke and roar: just rivers that wind slow and ancient between ruined oil-towers and empty mines. The scent of clover almost covers that of rust.

The deadlands, they call them. They lie torn-open and fallow, any resources long since extracted. Implication: this is what death is. To be useless. To exist, live, but with nothing in your body to feed industry or war.

Suzaku has seen enough death to last him a lifetime. Ten lifetimes – twenty. One for each stripe on his uniform. One for each Knightmare he called his, each civilian who looked at him confused, pleading, their faces so like his own.

Here in the deadlands, he can forget. He can lay a palm on the wheel and look at Lelouch, asleep next to him and leaning gently into his shoulder. The roads here are so straight and unvarying, stretched taut like string across the land, that he barely has to worry about steering. If he wanted to, he could take both hands off and keep them in his lap, letting the automobile glide through fields as empty as the sky above.

Suzaku keeps one hand on the wheel. He does so only out of habit, not need; for it is out of habit that the body moves, keeping time to a song that has long since disappeared.

* * *

Lelouch: luminous, fluid, flash of mercury and shine of silk. Volatile, passioned, grand words and grander gestures. His voice: charged with conviction, dripping with theatre. Listen to him – turn your head. How could you not? What else could you do?

Lelouch: fragile, vulnerable, glass of a lightbulb around its white-hot filament. The hitch in his breath when he says Suzaku’s name. The hesitation each time, as if by saying a name he might break it.

Lelouch: boy in the passenger seat of this same car. Hands hugged around his knees, hair damp and flat across his face. Nothing but a boy: moonlight tracing his profile, not quite twenty, and so terribly, terribly small.

* * *

Suzaku wakes in the morning. The night before, he had pulled them over to the side of the road and opened the roof (a quaint little feature that had reportedly been popular fifty or sixty years ago); he’d thought it would be good to let the air in. Opening his eyes, he’s grateful that he did – the sun comes down in suffocating blankets, hot and sticky.

Suzaku raises his hands to his face, starting to pick out the crust in his eyes. “Lelouch,” he says in a weak mumble.

There’s no response from Lelouch, who stands thirty feet away from the car in a field of yellow grass. Even from so far off, he looks tense. His posture is unnaturally straight, his arms wrapped tight around his chest. Suzaku swears, stumbling out of the car. As his feet hit the ground, Lelouch turns around.

“What do you want?” he says.

“I just wanted to say good morning,” says Suzaku. He can hear how idiotic the words sound the moment they leave his mouth. _Good morning_. As if nothing had changed; as if both of them were still children, thoughtless and trusting in that summer sun.

“I don’t have time for this,” says Lelouch.

His eyes are ringed in gray, and his features cast long sharp shadows. Suzaku thinks of the Britannia family portraits he’s seen at Pendragon – walls lined with rows and rows of pale faces, bloodless and menacing.

“You don’t – look.” Suzaku walks into the field, stopping when he and Lelouch are an arm’s length apart. “I don’t know everything that’s going on. I don’t know about – half the things, even. All this – whatever you’re planning, whatever you’ve been up to – I have no idea.”

It’s a half-truth at best. Suzaku has some idea of the situation – he couldn’t have spent the past two weeks living in the palace without putting together a few things. But he knows the best way to talk to Lelouch is to appeal to his ego. Make him feel needed.

Lelouch is watching him, now, with some attention, an implicit _state your case_ in his eyes. Suzaku takes the opening.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” he says. “But I know it’s. Bothering you.”

“Oh, so you brought me out here to _talk_ to me. Well, go and fucking psychoanalyze me. Have at it. A fascinating exercise, I’m sure.”

“My god, why do you have to be so – “

“Difficult? I would ask the same of you, Suzaku. Suzaku, my _love._ ”

The word is drenched in sarcasm, and it hurts. He doesn’t mean it – might not – hopefully not – but that, too, has an impact. That Lelouch could be so careless – that he could say cruel things without a second thought.

Lelouch has always been careless. He has always been capricious, cruel – just not to Suzaku.

“Love, is it?” says Suzaku lightly.

Lelouch flinches visibly. For just a moment, pain flits across his face – then it’s gone, as quickly as a wave vanishing in the vast blank of the sea.

* * *

Suzaku: burning, blinding, hawk-talon cruelty and bayonet’s gleam. Raised in the bowels of war, honed into its finest weapon. Sharper and better than anyone who doubted him – pride of the colonies, exception to the rule. New blood could top old, made-Britannian over born-; Suzaku being the living proof.

Suzaku: speaking, laughing, gentle eyes and steady hands. A way with people that made them trust him – _you’re a good listener, Suzaku. You’re a good friend._ Smiles that came soft and generous as spring rain. He has never had the luxury of being rude. Even less so now – an honorary Britannian is harmless and mild, a tame falcon eating out of the master’s palm.

Falcon-tamers of old sewed shut the bird’s eyes, opening them only for hunting. Again and again, the falcon brought in its prey, then returned to a world it could not see.

* * *

“Where are we going?” says Suzaku. They’re in the automobile again, and Suzaku’s hands rest on the cracked leather of the wheel.

“That’s none of your concern,” says Lelouch. He’s turned resolutely in the other direction, face pressed into the passenger-seat window.

“Lelouch, I – you can’t ask me to drive and not tell me where we’re going.”

“We’re going – somewhere. Far away.”

“Do you have directions, maybe? A map on the – ” Suzaku raises his hand to use the dashboard console before remembering – of course. There isn’t one. Lelouch had insisted on them taking the oldest vehicle Suzaku has ever seen, a pale turquoise convertible with a key that had to be inserted manually.

“Why are we here? Why are we _doing_ this? You can’t just explain nothing and expect people to do as they’re told.”

“I can, and I always have.” Lelouch says, turning to look at Suzaku. His eyes are narrowed, his mouth set in a slight sneer. “You wouldn’t have come with me otherwise.”

“I didn’t come with you because you told me so. I came to get answers.” It’s true – he’s had barely a single opening even after weeks spent at Pendragon. Lelouch has been noticeably avoiding him, slipping unseen from meeting to interminable meeting.

“What _answers_ could you possibly need?”

Suzaku tightens his grip on the wheel, fighting to keep his voice even. “ _Where am I driving us to_ would be a start.” _We can slowly work up to the real questions,_ he thinks. Things like: _are you sorry? Do you care about me? Have you ever said an honest word in your life?_

“I don’t have time for this.” Lelouch speaks with a pristine, cut-glass accent, clear bright vowels and crystal-sharp consonants. A colonizer’s English.

Suzaku wonders how he’s spent two days in a car with Lelouch without killing him yet. It would be very easy – albeit not too good for his career. _Why do I let him get away with this?_ he thinks.

Rhetorical question. Suzaku knows why.

He sighs. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Lelouch. You don’t – you don’t tell me anything. Haven’t, for a while.”

Lelouch looks at him for a moment, then turns around to stare out the window. Outside, fields of sun-bleached grass extend in every direction like seas of bone-white.

“It didn’t used to be like that,” Suzaku says quietly. “I remember – “

He looks to his right. There’s been no response from Lelouch, who remains silently facing the window.

Suddenly Suzaku feels a burning full-body shame, as if he had told a joke to a group of people and no one had laughed. Stupid of him to think Lelouch would have listened – naïve, to think this was the same person as the Lelouch he once knew.

“Never mind. Forget that I said anything.” He turns back to look out the windshield and puts his hand on the ignition. The key is cool and firm between his fingers.

“Wait,” says Lelouch.

“What is it?”

“It’s somewhere I’ve been when I was young. The place where we’re going, is.” Lelouch looks at Suzaku. “You needn’t be suspicious or anything. It’s just – somewhere that’s safe. Away from the war.”

His eyes are a color Suzaku knows so well, an odd gray-violet like clouds during a sunset. In his expression, there is something close to fear.

* * *

They drive past a chain of abandoned towns, where rusted building-frames lie scattered like giants’ bones. Their walls sag like rotting skin, sun-bleached wood shot through with veins of greenery. Around them are fields and fields of barren farmland, parched dirt piled high with dead corn-stalks. Waste soil – unfit for crops, unsafe for living. A generation of monoculture has sucked it dry.

Britannian farming leaves such scars. War is not the only killing thing.

Suzaku thinks of Pendragon, glittering jewel-bright amidst the wreckage. Lelouch is Britannia’s child – skin white as ashes, mouth red as blood. His finery is stolen, Suzaku thinks – his colors sucked from the very land. What makes Lelouch possible is that all of this lies dead.

* * *

At dark, Suzaku pulls over at what used to be a gas station. He’s never seen one before, but recognizes it from a textbook illustration. Gasoline based vehicles are almost unseen these days; the one he’s driving has been retrofitted with a cheap sakuradite engine.

Suzaku drives in and parks at the back of the station. He rolls down the roof. Smells of dirt and petroleum drift in from above. Beside him, Lelouch sits silent and unmoving in the passenger seat.

“So,” says Suzaku.

“So,” says Lelouch.

The distance between them aches. There is too much to say and too little; somehow both are true at the same time. Even looking at Lelouch is like touching a fresh bruise.

Finally, Lelouch breaks the silence. “Do you hate me, Suzaku?”

“What?”

“Do you hate me?”

“Lelouch, I – “ Suzaku takes a breath. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” Lelouch’s tone is light, conversational.

Suzaku struggles to put words to the feeling. “It’s like – I don’t know you. Lelouch vi Britannia who did those terrible things is – when I think of him, I do hate him. But when I see you, I can’t put it together. You look – you look just the same as you used to. Before.”

In his chest he feels a painful twist – _keep it together_ , he thinks. _Don’t let it show._ But he does – he can’t avoid it, when his voice breaks a little on the last word, falling pathetically into the silence.

When Lelouch speaks, his voice is weak – not his usual baritone but something fragile, almost childlike in sound. “I wish I didn’t have to do – what I did. I mean – I always did what I thought was needed. There was a plan; there was a structure to it. But I – “

He looks away again, and Suzaku realizes he’s hiding something – he doesn’t want his expression seen. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” Lelouch finishes, whispering.

The silence between them is the type that follows a bomb: haunting, dense.

Lelouch is close enough that Suzaku can see that his eyes are red, his lips scabbed as if he’s been biting them. He looks at Suzaku and there’s something so vulnerable in his face, so utterly raw and open. The sight of it is almost enough for Suzaku to forgive him – almost, but not enough.

“You did hurt me,” says Suzaku, his voice soft. “I don’t think anyone has ever hurt me like this. But I don’t hate you.” He sucks in his breath against his teeth. “I wish I did – I wish to God that I could. But in the end I can’t. Because.”

“Because?”

Suzaku’s breath catches. “Because it’s you.”

As if something has been undammed, he starts to cry. The sobs are involuntary and shuddering, each one wringing out his lungs. He hates crying – hates how wretched and helpless he feels, how pathetic he must look. “I just keep letting you do it, don’t I? I keep thinking it’s going to be different – if I give you another chance you’ll be different, you’ll be in there. But you never are, and we’re not – we’re not going to go back.”

“Suzaku - “

Suzaku’s hands are clenched in fists, his voice strangled and raw. “I’m so stupid. All this time – I don’t know how I’ve been so _stupid_.”

“Fuck. Suzaku – fuck. I – ” Lelouch is crying too now, trying vainly to hide it. “Don’t cry. Fuck. Suzaku.“ When he turns back his eyes are wide and desperate. He puts one hand on Suzaku’s arm.

“I’m the stupid one,” Lelouch whispers. “I didn’t see – I wish I – fuck. Please – please – Suzaku – forgive me.”

Without thinking Suzaku leans into him, wrapping an arm around his back. He feels Lelouch’s face touching his neck, tears wetting the space between their skin. Somehow it is right – the other boy warm against him, breathing in soft shallow gasps.

“We can’t ever go back,” says Lelouch, looking up. “But we can go forward. And forward can be something new.”

* * *

Things to think about: Lelouch’s hair falling over his forehead, eyes closing gently as Suzaku strokes his back. The join between his neck and jaw; the moonlight moving over him, that coating of silvery frost. Lelouch turning and sighing in his sleep, his head shifting on Suzaku’s collarbone. The touch of him, soft and warm, a bit clammy with sweat.

Suzaku gently extricates himself from Lelouch’s arms. He takes the other boy by the shoulders and slowly moves him back into the passenger seat. Lelouch’s head jerks, then droops gracelessly over his chest. A pang of embarrassment hits Suzaku, as he’s seeing something he was never meant to.

He unbuttons his cardigan – a soft, blue thing with the cuffs worn thin – and drapes it over Lelouch’s shoulders. Folding it over a few times, he arranges it into a pillow-like shape. Then he lifts and straightens Lelouch’s head, placing it on the makeshift headrest.

Lelouch’s face is calm, his breathing slow and even. His eyelashes tremble slightly in the breeze – they are long and dark, uncommonly pretty for a boy’s. Using a finger, Suzaku pushes a lock of hair off Lelouch’s cheek. A tide of feeling rises in him, something hot and awful and far too close to fond.

Suzaku leans back in the driver’s seat. He’ll worry about it tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll ask. For now he’ll think of nothing; for now there’s only him and Lelouch, and the night air is a blanket that shields them from the world.

* * *

Lelouch is already up when Suzaku wakes, standing outside on the concrete and looking at the car. At the edge of the gas station, the sun shines low in the sky. The dead grass splits its light into narrow bars. Lelouch’s silhouette is dark on the horizon. When Suzaku opens the door he takes a step forward, then freezes.

“Morning, Lelouch.”

“Morning, Suzaku.”

Suzaku looks at the other boy, stretches and then straightens his stance again. _Which personality will it be today, Lelouch?_ he wonders. _What’s next on the schedule? We’ve been through quite a few._

At one point he would have trusted the Lelouch of yesterday. Something in him still wants to, reaching blindly for affection like a weak plant in the dark. But by now, he knows how to push it down.

He takes a breath. “Lelouch, I think it’s time you explained some things.”

“Some things,” says Lelouch, “are difficult to explain.”

“Sounds like your problem. Why don’t you use that brilliant strategic mind?”

Lelouch stands with his hands on his hips, one foot cocked with the heel on the ground. “You misunderstand me.”

It’s maddening how blasé he looks, how casually arrogant. “Stop treating me like I’m stupid, Lelouch. I know you think I’m below you, but it’s rude to act like it.”

Lelouch steps forward, still moving with that fluid princely grace. Suzaku knows a childhood of deportment lessons has ingrained it in him – all the royal family walk like this, back straight and arms languid. At an arm’s length away from Suzaku he pauses, hands hanging at his sides.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, and I don’t consider you below me.” He pauses. “On the contrary – you’re one of the very few people who aren’t.”

“Then _explain_ ,” says Suzaku. “Explain why we’re here. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now, as we stand.”

Lelouch’s voice is a precise, studied type of calm. “As I was saying; some things are difficult. Not because you wouldn’t understand. They’re difficult – for me.”

It’s then that Suzaku notices – Lelouch is still wearing the blue sweater around his shoulders, stroking it with one hand. With his other hand he grasps the fabric where it meets hits collarbone, gently holding it up. His eyes are fixed on the ground – he brings his feet together, then slowly exhales.

“Go on,” Suzaku says.

“It’s like this.” Lelouch gazes somewhere to Suzaku’s left, not quite making eye contact. “Imagine if you were ten years old and you had a friend. At that age you trusted no one – you were a bit of a shit, really, we all were – but there was this friend, and you liked him more than anyone else you’d ever met. All you wanted was for him to like you just as much.”

Overhead, a hawk swoops low in the sky, momentarily casting a shadow over the two of them. Lelouch inhales, then continues.

“You were young, and safe, and the war was only starting. It didn’t feel quite real. But then – your friend left. And when you next saw him it was in a place where fire fell like rain. You sat down next to him, and you made a promise.”

 _I will destroy Britannia_ , Suzaku thinks. The voice of child-Lelouch is still clear in his mind.

Lelouch clutches the sweater closer, as if shivering, even in the heat of the sun. “Eight years pass,” he says. “You find a way – you make a plan. You mask your face. Purple darker than the sky, gold brighter than the sun. You ask him to join you, and when he says no, you ask again. And again. And each time it hurts, but you don’t know why; you don’t want to know why.”

His voice is still breathy, soft in the air. “So you hurt. Then your friend – he humiliates you. He tears you from those you love. He cuts you up and grinds dirt into the wound. These are monstrous things, hideous things. You hate him, now. There’s a room in your heart that you’ve kept for him to live in. You go and you shut it and tear down the walls.” Lelouch tilts his face upward, and his hair falls down against his neck. “And all the while it hurts,” he says. “You can’t stop it hurting.”

He pauses, and there is a silence. The words hang like shards of glass in mid-air, broken edges primed to strike the skin.

Then he takes a deep gulp of air, as if preparing to dive. “There is a world,” he says, “where things are still whole. Your friend is safe, and you are with him, and everything is right. There was – you could have found a better way, and – you didn’t. You don’t live in that world. There is only the present, this ugly present, broken in so many ways.”

Finally he locks eyes with Suzaku, his voice trembling. “And this is what hurts – because still – even still – you think about it. All this time – you can’t stop grieving what could have been.”

Lelouch stops. He turns his head away and stands looking downward, breathing in ragged gasps. His hands hang at his sides, curled like question marks. The quiet hits Suzaku like something solid; that sudden absence of speech is sharply, intensely painful, like flesh missing from a wound.

“Lelouch,” says Suzaku, quietly.

“What?”

“You’re so hard on yourself.”

“I don’t intend to be,” says Lelouch. “I want to be truthful, is all.”

“Still – I’m sorry.” Suzaku sighs. “For Nunnally. And – for everything else.”

He steps forward. When Lelouch finally turns back to face him, their eyes meet. Suzaku holds the gaze.

“I’m sorry too,” says Lelouch. “I am sorry for – many things.”

“We have things to be sorry for. You and me both.” Suzaku says, still looking steadily into Lelouch’s eyes. “And those things – can’t be undone. But it’s like you said.”

“Like I said?”

“Forward can be something new.”

* * *

They spend the day driving. Suzaku is weary, and he doesn’t know if it’s him or Lelouch that’s done it. But he’s glad to see the fields vanishing behind them, giving way to crisp sky sliced up by stands of young trees. He opens the window, and the air that blows in smells wet and green.

As Suzaku drives they talk about Kururugi Shrine and the frogs in the summertime; about Aries Villa and the imperial gardens. There’s an easy comfort to be found in nostalgia. The terrain is familiar, the memories soft and sweet.

The sun is low in the sky now, coating the trees in light thick as honey. It runs down the windows of the car, smooth and golden. “We’re almost here,” says Lelouch. “You can pull over.”

“I still don’t know where we’re going.”

Lelouch smiles, something new and hesitant in his eyes. “I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

And as he looks at Lelouch, Suzaku realizes that he doesn’t care. Outside, there is a war. In the morning the warmth will be gone; he'll be left with his lungs full of pain, the break between them jagged and ruthlessly sharp. But here, now – this can be perfect. For just these few seconds, they are safe. For just a moment, nothing matters more than seeing Lelouch’s face so bright; nothing is so precious as this one boy's smile in the sun.

Outside, there is a war. But for a moment – just a moment – it can wait.


End file.
